Most graduate schools calendars are going to have something explicit to say about how long students have to finish their programs, especially the PhDs. the Dalhousie Calendar says that the PhD / JSD is a 6 year program for full-time students only (i.e., not part-time).
Let's talk about the full-time / part-time question first. For students doing bench science and who are "fully" funded, there is a relatively easy way to confirm this. But for just about everyone else, this is one of those "rules" that is more honored in the breach than in the observance. How would any one monitor it? What do we expect of students with families and limited funding?
So let's set aside the full-time /part-time issue. Our calendar goes on to specify the general policy around leaves of absence, and extensions beyond the expected period. But as you read down the page there emerges an ominous tone- "Under no circumstances can a student be registered in a program for more than 10 years."
I've had some extensive discussion with a couple of parties on this exact topic, and my valued colleague Hal asked the question. Why do we have a 10 year rule?
Good question, Hal. And since I wasn't around when the rule was created, I didn't have the complete argument ready to hand apart from the obvious ones. So I did what any sensible academic would do. No, not Wikipedia. I went to scholar.google.com.
There is no shortage of discussion about how to shorten time-to-completion, but very little on why this is desirable. So I combed through a lot of material and put the following together.+
Permitting long
times-to-completion increases the likelihood of not
completing. It undermines the focus
necessary for a successful outcome. There is an old rule in
project management
“If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would get done.” My suspicion – if our program officer hadn’t alerted
the
student she was past the deadline, we would have been talking
about this 2, 3,
4, 7 years from now, wherever the deadline was set.
The longer the period of
time from initiation of studies to dissertation production
produces a risk that
what was learned for the comprehensives is no longer a sound
basis for the
research. There are very few fields of
studies which would be willing to assert they aren’t making
material progress
over a decade.
A policy of
permitting exceptions beyond 6 years encourages poor
supervision. I submit this
is exactly what has happened in this case, even taking into
account the death of the student's supervisor.
The longer period of
time from initiation of studies to dissertation production
sometimes creates a
situation where there is ongoing funding in the face of
inadequate progress,
funding that could have been used for more productive,
more focussed students. Long times-to-completion
also dilutes the supervisory help available to other students.
I haven’t had
the time to ask staff to determine what the total level of
support for the student applying for the exemption has been over the decade; I’m afraid of what the
answer might be, and the implications.
Well, what does it
matter if we let this one student complete? It’s not going to
be the end of
Western civilization as we know it, is it?
Of course not. But it
undermines
the policy and creates a situation where it is difficult to
apply the rule at
all. Permit an anecdote that speaks to
my
concern around long time-to-completions and the effect on
quality. There was a
beer company in the US
that had some smart management consultants in to make a
recommendation about
how to improve profits. They ran an experiment between two
beers, the first
created using the current ingredients, and the second using
very slightly
inferior ingredients. Knowledgeable
beer
drinkers simply could not tell the difference. So management
went with the
ever-so-slightly inferior inputs that, of course, cost less.
You can guess the
rest of the story. Four incremental
experiments of this kind produced exactly the same result. There is always an increment of lower
quality
that is difficult to detect. But by
the
time they got to the fourth, there was a very discernible
difference between
the original beer, and the last iteration. It was enough to seriously
change the
demand for the beer, undermining the brand as a whole. So we
let one through, and the other two cases on my desk have a
case for appeal (consuming yet more resources better allocated
elsewhere). So I let 3 students through. Now we enter into a
debate about whether any deadline (15 years? 20 years?) is
necessary. There is one thing for certain. Whatever deadline
you choose to set, someone is going to ask for an extension.
Other arguments for
why time-to-completion is an issue.
- Delayed graduation
affects career progression for many students.
- Encourages letting
“the perfect” stand in the way of “the good”, and even “the
acceptable” when "acceptable" of course by definition is
acceptable.
- Long program
timetables makes it possible for faculty to exploit students
in their effort to generate research outcomes for their own
labs.
- “Low
completion rates deter prospective graduate students, thus
creating long-term staffing and academic consequences, and
long times-to-completion reduce the time graduates may
potentially spend in gainful employment, which is particularly
hurtful in an era of crippling student debt loads.” (PhD Degree Completion in Canadian
Unviersities by Frank Elgar of Dalhousie University. There is another related report from CAGS available.)
- Time-to-completion
figures are a measure (whether you like it or not) that
governments and most universities themselves use as one proxy
for university effectiveness. By
permitting extensions like this, there is a reputational risk
for the department, the faculty and for the university. In the UK
time-to-completion data is used for funding purposes -- that’s how important this issue is to
the people responsible for public policy and funding for
universities. NIH thinks it’s important. The UK
and German national governments think it’s important.
- Such delays in
completion are often a sign of problems in supervision. I’m not able to comment specifically in
this case, since there is not much in the way of annual
progress reports for this student.
- Extending
time-to-completion generally produces much higher debt for the
student.
- Overall higher
time-to-completion rates reduce the throughput for the
development of HQP.
So that is how the debate went.
I did learn one lesson in all of this. We at Grad Studies are going to take a much more proactive approach to this. We are going to find the students who are at year 5, and ring the bell. We don't care whether the students perceive the bell as the signal for the last lap, or the warning bell. We just want them and their supervisors paying attention to the time-to-completion issue much sooner than 10 years.
Sunny
twitter: @sunnyatdal